Your Doctor Doesn't Know What to Do With Fitness-Tracker Data

Patients are increasingly bringing their fitness-tracker data to their checkups. Not only are doctors ill-equipped to deal with this information, they’re sceptical that it’s even useful.

As Andrew Rosenblum points out in his latest MIT Technology Review article, doctors are profoundly unimpressed with wearables manufactured by the likes of Fitbit, Apple, and Pebble. As patients disclose the troves of information collected by these fitness-trackers, physicians are at a loss to understand the significance of the data, while also questioning the accuracy of such devices.

Rosenblum quotes Andrew Trister of Sage Bionetworks as saying:

I’m an oncologist, and I have these patients who are proto ‘quantified self’ kinds of people. They come in with these very large Excel spreadsheets, with all this information — I have no idea what to do with that.

It’s difficult, says Trister, to interpret potential trends embedded within this data, particularly from a clinical perspective. To which a senior research scientists adds: “Clinicians can’t do a lot with the number of steps you’ve taken in a day.”

It doesn’t help that most of these fitness-trackers aren’t as reliable or robust as medical-grade devices. As Rosenblum writes:

And in fact wearable devices such as the Fitbit haven’t been clinically validated to perform at the same standards for reliability that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration uses for medical devices, such as the traditional blood-pressure cuff in a doctor’s office. Consumer wearables are marketed under the FDA’s less rigorous “wellness-focused” rubric

According to Trister, the most promising devices aren’t the generalised ones, but rather the ones that target a specific metric, such as Empatica’s Embrace wristband, which tracks stress levels via skin conductance.

Rosenblum is right to point out the current limitations of fitness trackers, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the tremendous potential of these devices in the future. Yes, doctors aren’t equipped to deal with this information right now, but that’s going to change. As clinicians become increasingly aware of these trackers, and as they collect better and more accurate data over time, these devices could become a powerful tool for helping patients, especially those with chronic diseases.